1Better At Marketing Training

2Better At Marketing Training 2013, Todaymade, todaymade.com

No More Push Marketing!

How To Ditch The Pitch and Be Human Again

3Table of Contents1. Why your online marketing will probably fail before it

succeeds. on page 4

2. The secret to never using push marketing tactics again.

on page 7

3. Three examples of bad online marketing, and what to

do differently. on page 11

4. Why focusing on a niche is one of the best things you

can do for your marketing. on page 16

5. The final lesson in push free marketing how to be

human again. on page 20

4Why your online marketing will probably fail before it succeeds.An introduction to push marketing.

For years we have been doing marketing a certain way. We put a message

down on a piece of paper, we tie it to a good sales offer and pay through

the nose to put it in front of as many faces as possible.

When it comes to online marketing, we dont handle it much differently,

unfortunately. We take the same message, the same deal, and we promote

it to death. The results are often disappointing, so we blame the online

platform as not being all its cracked up to be.

Instead of the blaming, lets take a step back and look at why the method

keeps failing, no matter what platform were using.

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5IT IS PUSH MARKETINGWhen we take our message and force it on our customer, its called push marketing. For years, this is how marketing has been done. We learned this method from what we see in mass media on TV and magazines, and we let it define our small business strategy. Shouting our message at people simply will not work any longer.

IT ISNT AUDIENCE FOCUSEDIn traditional marketing, we are forced to talk to a very broad audience. Online marketing, however, doesnt require this same approach. The Internet is unprecedented in its ability to connect audiences to products. Our approach can be more focused, if were willing to learn how to do it. We must think in terms of having a focused audience, not a broad or general audience.

IT ISNT HUMAN ENOUGHWhen we were children, adults often had to remind us to use our inside voice when we were too loud for the setting. Who knew we had more than one voice? But we did, and still do. We have our regular voice that we use when we talk to friends, and we have our business voice that we use when we talk to customers through our marketing. The business voice is very professional, polished, a bit fake, and kinda stuffy. The Internet is a place of conversation, and it amplifies the fake sound to that business voice. Use the same voice for customers that you would with family and friends.

6More than likely you have made one of these errors in your online

marketing. Thats OK. Were here to help you make new habits. Identifying

the errors and desiring to make some changes is the start of success.

DISCUSSION:

How has push marketing infiltrated your marketing?

Does your Facebook page look more like a broadcast than a

conversation?

Why do you think the error of push marketing is so easy to make?

7The secret to never using push marketing tactics again.Make the world better, one ad at a time.

Our first chapter identified a key reason your online marketing is failing: you

are using old-school push marketing tactics. Youve identified the problem.

Now its time to get started on that solution.

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8NEVER SEND A PUSH MARKETING MESSAGE AGAIN!Push marketing is a tough habit to break, because it is so easy. Its the classic product-to-blog approach. We take our product and we push its message onto our blog or other online venues.

It sorta looks like this:

Product > Blog

If this is our habit, what were essentially doing is talking about ourselves, all the time. We are broadcasting, not having a conversation. There are two problems with broadcasting: first, well run out of things to say fairly quickly, and second, no one cares about us. Harsh, but true.

How best to fight off this broadcasting disease?

CREATING VALUEWe should create content that our readers and customers can value and gain something from. When we focus on creating this type of content we easily avoid centering the conversation on ourselves and our products.

The key to creating valuable content is to constantly ask ourselves the question: Whats in it for them?

Really.

When our marketing actually starts becoming the answer to this question, we have officially moved passed the push phase on moved onto value-based marketing.

9MAKING LIVES BETTERIt would be easy to convince ourselves that information about our product or service is actually valuable. Once in a while, it may be. Generally, though, its not as valuable as we think. To prevent ourselves from falling into this line of thinking we need to ask ourselves a slightly different question: How is my marketing making my customers life better?

This fundamental question is probably difficult to answer under our current marketing methods. Remember, our product or service in and of itself is not a satisfactory answer to this question. Were asking how our marketing is making lives better, not our product.

THE NEW APPROACHArmed with these new questions, our marketing strategy should look more like this:

Value based content > Blog > Product

When we make valuable content the focus of our online and offline marketing efforts, we create a reason for our customers to actually pay attention to what we are saying. Wouldnt it be nice if your customers actually relied on you more than you relied on them?

Our product or service isnt completely out of the picture with this model, but it is minimized to some degree. What we are looking to establish is a group of followers that rely on us for useful and valuable information. If we do it right, we will be valued highly so that when it comes time for customers to buy something, they come to us.

With the old way, the push way, we needed our ad run to be perfectly timed with our customers buying decision, a near impossibiity. It was random, expensive, and should no longer be a part of our marketing.

It may sound all completely backwards, but your

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marketing should be a gift to your customers. This gift can come in the form

of training and teaching or even in the form of free introductory services.

Your gift is the value you provide them. Take some time today to brainstorm

a few ideas, and make sure they answer the key questions listed from this

chapter. Once you have your answers, apply these ideas to your marketing

right away.

DISCUSSION:

Do you think that your customers consider your current marketing

materials valuable? How are their lives being improved?

What can you do better? What gifts do you have that you can

give away?

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Three examples of bad online marketing, and what to do differently.Dont ride the neon bandwagon.

We are in the middle of a discussion designed to learn to put away old

push marketing tactics, and to start engaging the audience. Though there

are many things to consider, here are three primary sales and marketing

tactics that we use out of habit, why they dont work, and what we should

do differently.

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THE SALES SIGN SMACK-DOWNDuring the summer months, each Saturday morning is met with the same scene. Lawns and car windshields are decorated in a hot pink tagboard, window paint and balloons. This can only mean one thing: garage sales, big bagains, buy it now! Nothing says buy our great stuff like a visual assualt with balloons and bright signs.

This is a familiar scene on Main Street as well. Stores desperate to make a connection with random customers fill their windows with SALE paraphernalia. This type of marketing is questionably successful, and definitely not on a long-term basis. It is momentary, and it builds bargain hunters instead of loyal customers.

Unfortunately, we do the same thing on the web and in our social media. If our solution to getting more customers is in making our copy red, italic, bold, and underlined, realize that our methods and reputation are about the same as that of a garage sale.

This problem can also manifest itself in the language that we use. If the last several updates on Twitter were focused completely on a sales offer, such as 50% off today only, then our online strategy is mimicking the desperate sales signs if stires and garage sales, with the same long-term results.

WHAT SHOULD WE DO INSTEAD?First off, dont think that we cant mention our sales online. We can. The challenge is to avoid doing it in a manner and frequency that would be the equivalent of shouting at our customer. Social media is about conversation starting them and getting involved in them so our sales pitch needs to be a natural part of that conversation.

Basically, on day one in social media we havent earned the right yet to broadcast our sales. We need to spend some time providing value to our audience before we can start on the hard sell.

The key is making our sales offer a natural part of the conversation that we are already having.

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DRY AND DEAD ON ARRIVALOur audience likes information, as long as it is useful. For example, consider the Facebook news feed that only broadcasts upcoming events and blah-blah news about the organization that owns the page. The messages are generally short, informational and lacking any sort of humanity.

Now, how exactly are people suppose to have a conversation with that?

WHAT SHOULD WE DO INSTEAD?In sports radio, there are two types of broadcasters. First, there is the play-by-play guy. He is the one reports the straight facts about whats happening on the field. Then, there is the color-man. This is the guy that tosses in a fun fact every once and awhile. He is allowed to go off topic and is expected to keep the mood light. If both of these guys are doing their job right it should sound like a natural conversation with a good balance of fact and fun. Online marketing requires that we play both of these roles and deliver brilliantly.

Our social media cant be so stuffy that we become the only person listening. Remember, we are trying to talk with people, not at them.

Add some personality and flavor to our messages. Dont be afraid to show a little of who we are. Our audience will respond better when they feel like they are talking to a person and not a faceless organization.

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GETTING TOO TOUCHY-FEELYSpeaking of human, it is possible to get too human.

Our social media feed is not the place to show our needy side. When we dont get any immediate feedback and conversation from our social media feeds, we get worried. Our insecurity overcomes us and we panic and start asking for conversation in our posts. And then... insert awkward silence here.

Nothing happens.

Nothing in social media is more embarrassing than no one responding when you publicly ask for feedback.

We jumped the gun. We tried to start too soon. We need to have an engaged audience before we can engage them in conversation. If that audience isnt coming, then the problem isnt them the problem is us. We just arent talking about something that they care about.

WHAT SHOULD WE DO INSTEAD?If no one wants to have a conversation, its time to talk about something else. We have already talked about how we need to make providing value to our audience the primary goal of our social media. Get the audience engaged by talking about what interests them, and be patient as we discover what that might be. Dont let our insecurity force our own hand to do something well regret.

If we have been at our current online strategy for a few months and our Facebook page is a ghost town, then we need to stop and rethink our approach. It is definitely time to try something new.

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Those were just a few of the classic social media blunders, and its okay

if they are all too familiar. They tend to happen naturally. The main point

here is that you need to stop using push marketing to create conversation,

because it doesnt.

DISCUSSION:

Are there any neon signs in your social media storefront window? Which

of these blunders are you guilty of?

What has the response been when you have

committed one of these three errors?

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Weve made the commitment to never use push marketing tactics again,

right? The next decision is an important one: deciding who we are going to

be talking to.

We need to find our audience if we are going to have a conversation with

them. And, we need to be focused on who our audience is. Conversations

work better when both parties know each other, dont they?

Why focusing on a niche is one of the best things you can do for your marketing.Find your target and zoom in.

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WHY FOCUSING ON NICHE IS REALLY IMPORTANTThe Internet has the unique ability to create niche audiences, groups of people connected through very specific interests. What is the niche audience that we are going to serve? Usually, when we look to define our audience, we become fearful of missing any potential leads and exchange the chance of a specific audience for a broad and more random audience.

Broad is not better. It leaves room for wasted effort on people not really interested. We need to focus our social activity on a niche audience. There are a couple of reasons why this strategy is perfectly suited for online delivery.

WE KNOW WHO WE ARE TALKING TO.When we have a properly focused niche, there is never any question about who we are talking to or what we are talking about.

This decision provides the constant answer to the question of what should I say, because now we know what we can and cannot talk about. The only question then becomes one of whether or not it fits into our niche subject matter. If we are regularly struggling with what to say and trying to make our copy fit a split audience, then we probably arent properly serving the niche.

OUR AUDIENCE KNOWS WHAT TO EXPECT.Aside from it actually being easier for us to publish, focusing on a niche also makes it easier for our audience to understand. When we are niche focused, they can quickly determine if our social content is something that they should be paying attention to. We will gather our best audience together with success, because they are a willing and interested audience.

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FINDING OUR NICHEHow do we find our niche? The best way is to simply figure out what we know best. This may seem both a bit counter-intuitive and overly obvious, but it works. We, like the audience well attract, are interested in the same thing. When we develop our niche topic out of something that we can talk about endlessly, we make it easier to know what to say.

No need to fight against our natural niche.

MAKING IT OBVIOUSWe all like to be liked. If we arent careful, we might find ourselves slipping into the habit of trying to grow our audience by making our message broader or more inclusive. Our fear of excluding a few people creates something that doesnt really resonate with anybody. Our marketing becomes bland and we get bland results. It takes some bravery to focus our content on a niche, but thats exactly what we should do, and it should be done in an obvious manner.

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There should be no reason that visitors to your website, blog, or social

media feed have any question about who you are talking to. You have

probably less than eight seconds for them to decide if you are worth paying

attention to or not. When you write your copy you have two choices:

You can be cute or you can be obvious. Start with obvious. Worry

about cute later.

DISCUSSION:

Who is your target audience right now? Is it too broad?

What are you an expert at? How can you use that

expertise to focus on your niche audience?

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The final lesson in push free marketing how to be human again.No one likes a robots voice.

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Chris Brogan has made it his lifes work, at least so far, to teach people how

to be more human in business. At chrisbrogan.com, we see that his focus is

on how human business works. Brogans approach puts the human factor

back into business, both online and offline. Borrowing from his concept,

were going to look at how this humanity can help you stop push marketing.

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Online social media is relatively new, as far as communication is concerned. As it grew, we came to realize that we were no longer limited to a geographic ecosystem, but that we could communicate with the world. The world became one huge social network.

This means that if we want to understand the key to Internet and social media marketing, we need to understand the how and what of social networking. Social networks really do one thing: connect people to people.

THE KEY WORD HERE IS PEOPLEWe notice that the connection is between people, and not people to business. Social Networking isnt a sales center, but a place where people go to be human together. We talk, we laugh, we become friends, and sometimes we even disagree. It is the online version of the same human process that has been going on for decades.

Sadly, social media as often seen as merely a sales tool, another place to collect leads and to close deals. While it can do that, the backbone of the web is the humanity actually communicating on it. For too long we have been marketing robots writing boilerplate copy and mimicking the methods of everyone else.

We need to learn to be real again. To be human, as Brogan says. We need to become willing to put ourselves back into the marketing equation. This means that we need to stop broadcasting our marketing message and start talking to the people around us.

HOW TO BE HUMANHow do we do this? How do we leave our marketing robot behind and become a human again? Simply put, we talk to people like we are people. Like Soylent Green, Social Networking is made of people, of which we are one. This means that we comment on blogs, make conversation on Twitter, add new friends to our social networks and take an active interest in the online community that surrounds us and our business. We do it not just because of or for our business, but for the other people and because we enjoy the conversation whether we sell something or not.

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Social media isnt about the tools, and it definitely it isnt about the stats. It is about the connections that people are making to people. We can blog and tweet as a company, but as a company made of people for people.

DO SOMETHING TODAYThis entire guide talks about killing the push marketing bug that is killing our marketing, but the only real way that it is going to go away is if we actually start doing something. We shouldnt just review our current publishing strategies, but actually go and start some conversations on Twitter. No account? Get one. Follow some leaders in our industry, read the links that they are sending out and then strike up a dialogue about the subject. They are there for the same reason we are: to get connected and have a conversation.

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The world doesnt need any more push marketing. Conquer the

temptation to push and you will find yourself making great connections

and, consequently, great sales.

DISCUSSION:

What does the idea of human marketing mean to you?

How have you lost touch with your marketing humanity?

Jot down two methods that you can use to put the human factor back into

your marketing.

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